Rapidly and accurately determining the weight of a child can be of critical importance during pediatric emergencies and resuscitations. Emergency physicians use the weight of a child to select the medicament dosages, defibrillation energy (joules) and endotracheal (ET) tube size. In many instances, the patient is secured to an immobilization or spine board, which introduces challenges when trying to determine the patient's weight.
One solution to determining the weight of a patient, which has been used for decades and is prevalent in practice, is the Broselow Pediatric Emergency Tape (Broselow Tape or BT). The BT is secured to a spine board to provide a reference for determining weight based on patient height or length. U.S. Pat. No. 6,132,416 issued Oct. 17, 2000, the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference, details the method of determining proper medication dosage by correlating a plurality of dosages of a plurality of medications to respective weight-related values and assigning a color to each of the respective weight-related values. Weight-related values are correlated to the height of the patient. However, recent studies have shown that the BT practice is no longer entirely accurate as BT tends to now underestimate the weight of children. This has arisen from the worldwide childhood obesity epidemic.
Recently, emergency response backboards with integrated weigh scales have been developed to determine weight of a patient directly on the backboard, for example, as described in U.S. Pat. No. 8,892,203 issued Nov. 18, 2014, the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference. While useful for directly determining the weight of a patient, a separate problem arises as certain emergency procedures do not rely on weight of the patient, for example, the size of endotracheal tubes (ET) used in intubation.
There remains a need for a system that can provide emergency responders with a highly perceptible and an accurate patient weight, preferably with all potentially necessary patient information, particularly a pediatric patient, while the patient is on a backboard.